Claude Code history: offboarding a developer

What leaves with the laptop?

Why this is hard

The offboarding checklist covers repository access, SSO, cloud roles and the laptop itself. It does not cover the directories where AI tools keep their history, because nobody wrote them down — so the record of how a departing engineer built things leaves with the hardware.

What Claude Code specifically does to you here

Everything is in ~/.claude on the laptop being wiped. Nothing syncs, so the moment IT reimages the machine the record of that engineer's work is gone — including the 30 days that had not yet expired.

du -sh ~/.claude/projects

Where Claude Code keeps this in the first place: ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session>.jsonl. Transcripts older than 30 days are deleted by default, and nothing tells you it is happening.

What a working answer looks like

A working answer means the record survives the machine being wiped, without anyone having to remember to export it on their last day.

Start by measuring what you have. npx promptwake doctor reports what every AI tool on the machine is holding and how much of it sits inside a deletion window — no account, writes nothing, sends nothing anywhere. If the conclusion is that the record should not depend on one laptop, that is what PromptWake captures: prompt, response and the resulting diff, local by default and synced into a shared timeline on the paid tiers.